18th Annual Kids Alive Fest
Open House/Community-Safety Day at Children's Village

Children's Village of Washington County, Inc. will host its 18th annual Kids Alive Fest, Open House/Community-Safety Day, Saturday, May 16th, from 11am to 3pm at the Children's Village campus, 1546 Mt. Aetna Road in Hagerstown. Admission is free. Event will be held rain or shine.
Two area youngsters will be inducted into the Children's Village Life Safety Hall of Fame at a ceremony beginning at 12:15pm. The students are being honored for implementing skills they learned and practiced at Children's Village to properly handle their family emergencies.
Scheduled activities: Ronald McDonald Safety Show 11:30am; K-9 Demonstration 1pm (Maryland Correctional Institution); Auto Extrication Demo 2pm.
Additional activities: Car Seat Safety Check (Brethren Mutual Insurance Parking Lot); Bike Rodeo, bring bike and helmet, (Safe Kids of Washington County); Seat Belt Convincer (Maryland State Police); Child I.D. (Gaye McGovern Insurance Agency, State Farm Insurance).
Weather permitting activities include mini-car rides, radar gun contest, fire hose spraying challenge and helicopter display. There will be continuous tours of the Power of Fire House, and families will have the opportunity to complete safety stations throughout the day.
Attendees will leave the Kids Alive Fest with a wealth of safety information and skills acquired during an afternoon of great family fun. By participating in this community safety day, they can also support the mission of Children's Village.
Children's Village is a not-for-profit community service organization whose mission is to provide elementary school children of Washington County with the knowledge, skills, and confidence needed to prevent injury and empower them to make informed safety decisions.
Although recent news stories are filled with concerns about safety, Washington County, Maryland is ahead of the curve regarding child-safety education. Since Children's Village opened in 1990, over 27,000 area youngsters have learned safe living skills at the safety-education campus. Every second-grade student in Washington County attends Children's Village for two-days of free life-safety education. Children's Village receives no direct funds from the Washington County Public Schools
The Children's Village program is designed to create a safer community, one child at a time. The curriculum centers on life-safety issues for elementary-age students. Yet Children's Village serves not only these students, but ultimately reaches members of the entire community, as children work with parents or other family members on interactive homework assignments designed to make their lives and homes safer. In fact, a Johns Hopkins study revealed that positive behavioral lifestyle changes occurred in over 50 percent of all households having a child attend Children's Village!
Instructors are professional firefighters and police officers who present curriculum approved by the Washington County Board of Education. The Children's Village program provides two full days of classroom and hands-on experiences, one day dedicated to fire education and the other to personal safety. The Children's Village program is recognized as a national model for proactive child-safety education.
For the past three years, the Children's Village fire safety classes have been available to students from the Greencastle-Antrim and Waynesboro school districts, thanks to a committed corporate partner. This enables Children's Village to expand the outreach of its mission to an additional 600 students and their families, while also providing financial support for Washington County students.
Yet none of this would be possible without the foresight and commitment of a community dedicated to transforming its grassroots vision for child-safety education into the current Children's Village program and campus. If you visit Children's Village for the 16th Annual Kids Alive Fest on Saturday, May 19th, you, too, can support child safety in our community!
Event sponsors for the 18th annual Kids Alive Fest are Hagerstown Trust Bank and Susquehanna Bank. For more information about Children's Village of Washington County call 301-733-4443.